Chapter Seventeen Tristan #2
“I switched with Milly,” I said too quickly. Far too defensively. “Thought I should come.”
“Hm.” He watched me as if trying to solve a puzzle. “Marcus didn’t need to involve you in this.”
“Clearly he did, because it was looking as though you weren’t going to.”
A flash of irritation crossed his face before he smoothed it away. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?” I sat down and immediately regretted the shorts and shirt. The air conditioning was fierce here. Or maybe my shivers were about something else. “Before or after your funeral?”
“I didn’t want you worrying about something that might not become serious.”
“You’re having treatment. For cancer. It is serious.”
Silence stretched, punctuated only by the pump’s quiet hiss. For the first time in my life, he looked unsure of what to say.
“It’s manageable,” he settled on. “Radiotherapy. A few months, perhaps more. We caught it early.”
“So Henry tells me. Why you couldn’t is the troubling question.”
“Because you’re my son, not my caretaker. I didn’t want to become—”
“A burden?” I finished for him.
“Your work is demanding, Tristan. I didn’t want this overshadowing your pupillage.”
I almost laughed. “Overshadowing it? I found out from Marcus in the middle of the Strand.”
“As I said, he needn’t have troubled you.”
“Well, I’m here now.” I sat back. “So you can tell me what this all is now.”
“Hasn’t Doctor Henry Redmayne given you a blow-by-blow account?”
“Henry is doctoring other wounds.”
“Ah, of course. It is for the best.”
Of course, it was. For everyone but Henry and Zara.
I swallowed, tension knotting itself in my chest. “What’s the treatment for exactly?”
“Lung. The cough wouldn’t shift. They thought it was an infection at first, but—” He gestured vaguely, bitterness slipping through. “These things have their own intentions.”
Lung cancer. And he’d been going to work through this, through everything, just shouldering it as if his body wasn’t breaking down.
I didn’t know whether to admire him or shout at him.
“Dad…”
Nor did I know where the sentence was going. I hadn’t called him Dad in years. Somewhere around thirteen, ‘father’ had been imposed on us, as if titles mattered more than blood.
He lifted a hand as if brushing it away. “Tristan, don’t look at me as if I’m dying. I’m ill, not finished.”
“Then stop acting as if you don’t need anyone.”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “You sound like your mother.”
I didn’t know whether that was a compliment.
The curtain rustled as a nurse passed, and the tension eased between us. Not comfort exactly, but familiarity.
After a while, I asked, “How long have you known?”
“A couple of months.”
“Right.” I leant back, knotting my fingers together. “Good to know where I stand.”
He shot me a sharp look. “Don’t be petulant.”
“Don’t be deceitful,” I shot back.
It would have been an argument once. But he looked too tired to fight.
He watched the drip instead, eyes distant. “You must be busy,” he said finally. “Imogen keeping you drowning in paperwork?”
“Yes.” I checked around his bed, needing to feel useful. “Among other things.”
“Hm. I saw your chambers picked up the Wilkinson laundering brief.”
I stiffened. “…How do you know that?”
“Oh please. The CPS leaks like a sieve. Besides, it’s all middle-tier chatter. Nasty business, that one. Men like that… they leave a trail wherever they walk.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Once.
Then again.
I didn’t take it out.
“Be careful, Tristan. There are figures circling that case who don’t fight their battles in court. They eliminate obstacles quietly.”
“Can we not talk about work—”
“I’m not warning you as a barrister.” He locked his gaze onto mine, sharp despite the exhaustion, cutting straight through every layer I’d tried to armour myself with. “I’m warning you as my son. Keep yourself clean. Don’t attach yourself to people who drag shadows behind them.”
My throat tightened.
Razor sparked through my mind like a match strike in a dark room. Not for the first time since leaving his flat, but God I’d been trying, genuinely trying, to shut him out, to cram him into some corner of myself labelled mistake.
My phone buzzed again.
I pulled it out this time. Heart in my throat.
Wolfe: Breakfast next week? I have something you’ll want to hear.
Father glanced at the screen. “He’s someone to keep close.”
I let out a bitter-tasting breath. “Why? Because he can take me places? Because he has influence? Because he’s a better pedigree for me than Zara is for Henry?”
“Have you never heard the saying ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are you calling Lord Wolfe an enemy?”
A bit rich, considering Father had practically shoved me into Wolfe’s path a few weeks ago.
“No.” He coughed, reaching for a tissue, and I saw the blood spots. I pretended I didn’t. The same way I pretended I hadn’t hoped that message might have been from Razor. “Men in his position rarely make distinctions. They simply decide who is… useful. I’d like you to recognise the difference.”
A nurse swept in, checked the machines, removed the bloodstained tissue, and offered me a polite smile I didn’t feel I deserved.
Father continued once she’d gone. “In our line of work, Tristan, it’s never a bad thing when the people who could destroy you are also the ones shaking your hand.”
How poignant.
How strategic.
And how absurdly close to the bone. Because the people who could destroy me weren’t just shaking my hand. They were kissing me. Touching me. Fucking me.
But I didn’t say that.
Father closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “Tell Adrian you’ll meet him Monday for breakfast. Then come tell me what he said.”
I huffed a laugh, because of course this was orchestrated.
A Hale-Fitzroy family alliance in miniature.
A political manoeuvre disguised as fatherly concern.
But I wanted, stupidly, pathetically, to be a dutiful son for once.
A trusted son. So I replied to Wolfe with an affirmative.
Then I sat through the rest of Father’s treatment silently, making a quiet promise to myself: I will not slip back under.
I will not let Razor consume me again. I will drag myself out of whatever this is.
Father left with Mother afterward, ushered into a car with the same brittle dignity he wielded in court. Spine straight, jaw set, pretending the weakness belonged to the illness and not to him. Mother grabbed my face before getting in the car herself, looking me over.
“Get to the spa, darling. You look positively atrocious.” She kissed my cheeks. “And you’ll come to the fundraiser next month, won’t you? Eloise has worked ever so hard. You must support your sister-in-law. I believe your Zara is involved, too.”
“Yes, Mother.”
She smiled, then got in the car with Father, and they were gone.
And I was alone again.
I went home, sat in front of the television with a carton of something aggressively not Greek, trying to spoon normalcy into myself alongside cold noodles on a Friday night.
Case notes spread over the sofa. An evening I’d used to consider productive.
Except every time I blinked, I saw last weekend instead.
Razor’s hands, Razor’s mouth, Razor pinning me to sheets smelling of him.
I didn’t sleep. Even after I shoved his shirt, the one he’d given me to wear after the night at the restaurant, that had been under my pillow since, to the bottom of my wardrobe.
So early Saturday morning, before the sun was even up, I went for a run.
Classic avoidance strategy.
I got in my gear, shoved my AirPods in and ran as if distance could cauterise feeling.
Down the Thames Path to Hammersmith Bridge.
On to Barnes. Through Putney, where the rowers skimmed the water with an ease I envied.
Further still, until Richmond rose around me in sharp green and river glare.
I ran until my lungs burnt and my legs shook and my thoughts finally blurred into silence.
And on the long loop home, sweaty and breathless and half convinced I could outrun myself, I made a decision. A real one.
I was done.
Absolutely, resolutely done.
I would move on.
I would file the last few months of insanity under lapse in judgment. A brief seduction by danger I would not allow myself again. I would forget the man I should never have touched, never have let in, never have kissed in daylight.
I repeated it like a mantra with every stamp of my feet across the pavement.
Done.
Done.
Done.
My resolve lasted exactly three seconds.
As I rounded the corner and my building came into view, my pace faltered, then slowed entirely. Because there, on my doorstep, as if carved out of the exhaustion I’d been trying to outrun, was Razor.
The entire scaffolding of resolve I’d built over the last week collapsed with one brutal look up of those soft brown eyes.